Comme des Garçons

It would be impossible to overstate the influence of Rei Kawakubo – the designer who founded Comme des Garçons in 1969. Her non-comformist clothes aren’t like anyone else’s: though beautifully crafted, they’re often asymmetrical, deconstructed or even ‘destroyed’ in some way. And mostly, they’re black. Comme des Garçons wearers don’t buy her clothes: they collect them, and – because they transcend traditional fashion – can wear them for decades.

The name Comme des Garçons means ‘like the boys’, and was inspired by lyrics by the French chanteuse Francoise Hardy. As Vogue commented, it was chosen because it sounded good, ‘but it proved ironically apt for designs that challenged the traditional feminine ideal.’ Kawakubo’s first boutique, which threw open its doors in 1975 in Tokyo, set out to cater to a woman ‘who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.’ By 1981, Comme des Garçons was showing in Paris, where a seriously minimalist store – ‘white, pipe racks, no furniture’ is how The Chicago Tribune described it – opened the same year.

At around the same time, Comme des Garçons moved into fragrance, and has become known (and loved) for breaking rules in the fragrance world, just as they have with fashion: taking a single ingredient (such as incense, or leaves, or sherbet), and interpreting it in myriad ways.

— The Perfume Society